From Computer Tyme Support Wiki

Revision as of 19:09, 16 June 2010

Sometimes thing go wrong during the set up of our spam filtering service. Sometimes things are running fine and then all of a sudden email stops coming in. When this happens there's a panic. Where is out email? is it bouncing? What is going on? How do we get it fixed? There are a number of things that can happen and there are ways to figure it out and fix it. We will separate this into two sections although there is some overlap. The first will be when you are initially setting up the spam filtering service and the second is when things go wrong after spam filtering has been working for a while.

Problems During Setup

If you active our service and your email quits coming in after you change your MX records there's 2 things you need to keep in mind. If you can't fix it any other way you can put things back the way they were and try again later. Whenever you make changes to MX records save what the original setting were and set them back to original. Often the easiest way to fix something is to undo what you last changed. If you don't remember your setting contact your email provider and ask them for help.

The ext thing that is important is if you contact us by email, don't send email from the domain that is having the problem because we might not be able to reply to you because of the problem. Send email from a yahoo, hotmail, gmail or some other account that is not affected by the outage. Also include a phone number in case we need to call you and tell you what to do.

Often the problem involves some simple change or mistake that was made and we can usually figure it out fairly quickly. The more information you give us the easier we can figure out the problem. We don't want your eamil cut off either so your problem is our problem.

It is also important that you know that you can have your technical people contact us and the support people from your email provider. We will work with anyone who is supporting you. So feel free to forward our support information on you your other providers.

Important Points:

• Try to undo the last thing you changed
• Be sure we can contact you in response
• Contact us at: support@junkemailfilter.com or 415-992-3400

How Email Delivery Works

Before you use our service email is routed from the internet to you as follows:

+-----------+         +-------------------+
| Internet  |---->----| Your email server |
+-----------+         +-------------------+

The world knows where to send your email through MX records. (Mail eXchange) MX records are part of your DNS (Domain Name Services) which act as a directory for the Internet. In order for email to get to you your name services have to work, and they have to be set up correctly.

When you switch over to our services your email is routed through us first. We get in between the Internet and your email server. We accept email for your domain, process it, take out the spam, and then forward it on to your server. There are a number of steps and all of them have to work for you to get your email. If it doesn't work we isolate which step is failing and that step needs to be fixed to restore delivery. Here is a diagram of the email flow using our services.

+-----------+         +-----------------+         +-------------------+
| Internet  |---->----| Our Spam Filter |---->----| Your email server |
+-----------+         +-----------------+         +-------------------+

Things that can go wrong during setup

When changing over what we do is read your current MX records and put the lowest numbered MX record in our routing table. That tells us where to send your good email after we get done with it. Then we have yu change your MX records to point to us. If either of these steps are not done right then your email will stop.

Generally when your email stops during an error the email is not lost. We have a number of fail safe tricks to prevent loss. But some things we can't control so it is possible that your email will bounce.

If we are forwarding your email to the wrong place it won't work. We generally get this right but if you move your email service and we don't know about it we might be forwarding your good email to the old location. If you contact us we can easily tell if your email is coming to us, and if we are forwarding your email on and it is being accepted or rejected.

MX Record Mistakes

Generally however when your email stops during setup it is one of two things. If you set the MX wrong then your email won't get to us in the first place. The first thing you should do is check your MX records agains the instructions to make sure you set it right. Common MX record mistakes are:

• Misspelling - it's junkEmailfilter - not junkmailfilter.
• Missing Period at end - some DNS system require the records end in a period(.)
• Wrong Order - The priority numbers are important. If you get the sequence wrong it won't work

Your Server Rejecting you own Email

The other thing that commonly happens is that